Your Custom Text Here
It’s that time of year for Steve Manos’s “On Tap” social. This year it is Norland On Tap at Chicago Illuminating Company. The sponsors are Norland, Opengate, Latisys, and JLL.
If you’ll be in Chicago on Oct 16 your best bet to attend is to reach out to your contacts at the sponsoring companies for an invitation.
Unfortunately, I cannot make it this year, but I will be in Chicago the week after for another event.
I was at a data center social last week and a construction guy asked me what I do.
I have the about me page on this blog, but it doesn't really answer the question what I do, so let me try a different way to explain.
My degree is in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. What does in IEOR focus on?
The Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) educates students to become highly skilled in:
the quantitative modeling and analysis of a broad array of systems-level decision problems concerned with economic efficiency, productivity and quality;
the collection of data and analysis of data using database and decision-support tools;
the comprehensive modeling of uncertainty;
the development and creative use of analytical and computational methods for solving these problems;
and to obtain the broader skills, background and knowledge necessary to be an effective professional in a rapidly-changing global economy.
I spent 5 years at HP working in manufacturing and logistics from 1980 - 1985. When the printer business was building up and one of the divisions I worked in was the HP division that was the distributor for printers and computer supplies.
In 1984, HP introduced both inkjet and laser printers for the desktop. Along with its scanner product line, these have later been developed into successful multifunctionproducts, the most significant being single-unit printer/scanner/copier/fax machines. The print mechanisms in HP's tremendously popular LaserJet line of laser printers depend almost entirely on Canon's components (print engines), which in turn use technology developed by Xerox. HP develops the hardware, firmware, and software that convert data into dots for the mechanism to print.
I made the switch from HP to Apple and worked on distribution and supply chain logistics, OEM peripheral procurement, and operating systems from 1985 - 1992 coinciding with rise and fall period of Apple. Working on the Mac II and System were great. Working on the Mac Portable provided some good life lessons.
1986–1993: Rise and fall
See also: Timeline of Apple II family and Timeline of Macintosh models
The Macintosh Portable was Apple's first "portable" Macintosh computer, released in 1989.Having learned several painful lessons after introducing the bulky Macintosh Portable in 1989, Apple introduced the PowerBook in 1991. The Macintosh Portable was designed to be just as powerful as a desktop Macintosh, but weighed 7.5 kilograms (17 lb) with a 12-hour battery life. The same year, Apple introduced System 7, a major upgrade to the operating system, which added color to the interface and introduced new networking capabilities. It remained the architectural basis for Mac OSuntil 2001.
The success of the PowerBook and other products brought increasing revenue.[49] For some time, it appeared that Apple could do no wrong, introducing fresh new products and generating increasing profits in the process. The magazine MacAddict named the period between 1989 and 1991 as the "first golden age" of the Macintosh.
At Microsoft I was recruited to work on Win3.1 Far East fonts, then spent most of my time working on Windows Operating system up until Windows XP. After Windows XP, I switched to server, management tools, and evangelism. 1992 - 2006 was a long 14 years with a lot of changes. The Microsoft years can be long so I just embedded the three time periods below.
In 2006 I took a year off, then started working on data centers with Mike Manos at first, then Olivier Sanche.
I don't think I answered the question from the construction guy on what I do, but you have a better idea of what I did in my past.
I hope this gives you a laugh. I did. The NYTimes chose two letters to publish about the infamous James Glanz article on Sept 27.
Here is the first to make you laugh.
To the Editor:
For the last decade at least, we have been told that computerizing everything imaginable was part of an overall strategy of “going green.” Now we discover that computers are among the world’s most profligate, inefficient users of energy and that “the cloud” is a carbon-intensive, diesel particulate-spewing, eco-unfriendly fog.
The party ended last night, and the beer goggles just came off. I feel really dirty this morning.
CINDY BROOMAN
Delaware, Ohio, Sept. 25, 2012
So who is Cindy Brooman? A 61 year old small business owner of web site Point and Click Software. Wow Cindy thinks data centers are the most inefficient immoral users of energy. Her server hoster is a 200% renewable energy user which makes you think Cindy is a hardcore environmentalist.
OS Server Last changed IP address Netblock Owner F5 BIG-IP Microsoft-IIS/6.0 2-Oct-2012 66.96.143.162 Endurance International Group, Inc.
And the other letter is from NRDC promoting their upcoming cloud report.
A coming Natural Resources Defense Council report will reveal that not all clouds are created equal; there are “green” clouds and “brown” clouds. Those that carry out energy-efficiency best practices and use low-carbon energy sources are far more sustainable than typical server rooms.
Now these are the two letters that the editor choose to put into print. Talk about a waste.
I can’t wait to see what James Glanz fires out next. This is quite entertaining.
I don't think you you can say that Data Center Marketing is innovative. Not to say the people aren't smart, but by nature the data center industry is risk adverse and uses methods that have been proven over time. I am sure you have all noticed how you are ignore the marketing messages more and more. Trade shows are more about networking than seeing the latest technologies. Ads may get lots of eyeballs, but they don't meet expectations to marketing departments with few leads.
Some of the most innovative events have been when people host social events. Steve Manos has his "On Tap" events in Chicago. A group of us have a "downtime" event, (the opposite of uptime).
Wake up the Old Way of Marketing is Dead. HBR blog network has a post.
Marketing Is Dead
by Bill Lee | 3:00 PM August 9, 2012
Traditional marketing — including advertising, public relations, branding and corporate communications — is dead. Many people in traditional marketing roles and organizations may not realize they're operating within a dead paradigm. But they are. The evidence is clear.
...
Restore community marketing. Used properly, social media is accelerating a trend in which buyers can increasingly approximate the experience of buying in their local, physical communities. For instance, when you contemplate a major purchase, such as a new roof, a flat screen TV, or a good surgeon, you're not likely to go looking for a salesperson to talk to, or to read through a bunch of corporate website content. Instead, you'll probably ask neighbors or friends — your peer network — what or whom they're using.
...
Find your customer influencers. Many firms spend lots of resources pursuing outside influencers who've gained following on the Web and through social media. A better approach is to find and cultivate customer influencers and give them something great to talk about. This requires a new concept of customer value that goes way beyond customer lifetime value (CLV), which is based only on purchases. There are many other measures of a customer's potential value, beyond the money they pay you. For example, how large and strategic to your firm is the customer's network? How respected is she?
Another HBR blog post uses the success of PSY Gangnam Style as a way to do marketing in different ways.
Bill Lee, in a widely-read HBR blog, argued that "Marketing is Dead" in order to explain how the traditional marketing model between the manufacturer and consumer needs to be changed. That assertion is very much evident in the success of "Gangnam Style," which appears to have faithfully followed a social network-oriented playbook in its media use, content development and message.
To start, the song intentionally lacked a copyright so that people would be encouraged to create their own online parodies, in essence their own "XYZ Style" like "Lifeguard Style" and "Oregon Duck Style." The original "Gangnam Style" has been viewed over 200 million times worldwide, but if you count all the views of the parodies, one can imagine the total reach to be many times that.
Another social-network tactic is that crowdsourcing was used to choreograph the now famous"invisible horse dance." Instead of relying on his internal team, Psy invited and compiled suggestions from the whole Korean dance community to develop the widely popular moves.
Some of the most innovative ways to do data center marketing follow this recommendation.
Be open-minded, but in a controlled way. Psy's crowdsourcing strategy was limited to just the dance community. Confining the source of ideas to a knowledgeable base allowed Psy to increase creativity, but at the same time make sure that no time was wasted filtering out impractical ideas. Unrestricted crowdsourcing runs the danger of leading to outrageous results, such as when fans or pranksters on the Internet voted that Justin Bieber tour North Korea.
The days of spending big money in data center booths are in the past. More and more people are figuring out how to create social events. And, writing this post just gave me an idea on how to use this technique for a different data center social event.
Gangnam style may be silly and funny, but it's traffic is hard to argue with and its disruption for traditional music marketing is waking up a bunch of people. It is hard to argue with traffic stats like this. Look at Gangnam Style vs. Taylor Swift's numbers and the shape of the curve.
I've entertained the idea of writing content as a critic, but decided I didn't want that role.
a : one who expresses a reasoned opinion on any matter especially involving a judgment of its value, truth, righteousness, beauty, or technique
Being a critic is not fun. At least I don't think it is fun. Slate has a post on life as a critic.
Being a critic isn’t anyone’s childhood dream, an occupation that schools set out a booth for on Career Day, a religious calling that glimmers in the goldenrod.
...
To creatives, the Critic is the undermining inner voice maliciously put on the intercom to tell the whole world (or at least the tiny portion of it that still cares), You’re no good, you were never any good; your mother and I tried to warn you this novel was a mistake, but, no, you wouldn’t listen, Mister-Insists-He-Has-Something-to-Say. Failed artists consider critics failed artists like themselves, but worse, because unlike them they took the easy way out by not even trying to succeed, critics not having the guts to climb into that Teddy Roosevelt arena that everyone likes to invoke as the crucible of character, or risk the snows of Kilimanjaro.
...
Journalistic critics such as myself were, are, and forever will be routinely disparaged as parasites, sore losers, serial slashers, Texas tower snipers, and eunuchs at the orgy (what orgy? where is this orgy we seem to have missed?), which would hurt our feelings, if we brutes had any.
You can view NYTimes's James Glanz as a critic of the data center industry, pointing out areas where mistakes are made.
Being a critic means you are now a target for others to analyze your criticism. Here is a post by a non data center person making an observation. Larry starts off with a good skill of a critic, humor.
Stop The Presses: Computers Run On Electricity
By Larry M. Elkin Oct 2, 2012, 7:26 AM Author's Website
It is not easy for news organizations to support investigative journalism in this era of stagnant advertising, shrinking audiences and staff buyouts. So I’m not quite sure what to say to The New York Times for breaking the story that the Internet runs on electricity.
Thank you?
...
Most people probably don’t care, for the same reasons they don’t care about the nuts and bolts of all sorts of infrastructure. They just expect things to work.
The author identifies the hype factor.
Articles that lack a lot of news often resort to a lot of hype. This is especially apt to happen if a reporter has spent a year reporting a story that turns out to be not much of a story. And so it was with the first article in Glanz’s series, which resorted to straw men in order to drum up some excitement.
and how nuclear plants were added to the article, not natural gas powered plants or renewable energy plants to emphasize the evilness of data centers.
People are concerned about nuclear power, so nuclear power was worth mentioning. “Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to estimates industry experts compiled for The Times.” What about the equivalent output of windmills or solar panels? Would that be better?
Larry identifies that low utilization is an issue, but have you checked out the utilization of your PC lately? People should be restricted to PCs that have a 50% utilization or higher. No. That is when an upgrade was long over due . If users can't stand a 50% utilization on their PCs or smartphones how can they tolerate a high utilization experience from the cloud?
The newspaper also devoted considerable space to the idea that most servers in a typical data farm are doing very little work most of the time. That’s true, and it’s inefficient, and it is probably avoidable in many situations. So the server farms’ inefficiency is a fair point to make, but it also inherent in most forms of computing.
If you check the metering program that is probably installed on your own PC, you will likely find that most of your computing power is being consumed by the “idle process.” The central processing unit is waiting around for someone to do something. Your disk drive also spends most of its time lazily spinning, waiting for a program to ask it to read or write some data. Each server in a server farm is a PC that has been stripped down to its basics: a CPU, a disk drive and a network card, all more powerful than the ones in a basic home computer. The servers have no screens and no keyboards. They wait until they are called upon to serve.
Larry make the point that the NYTimes does not have perspective.
The main thrust of the series is that server farms consume a lot of power, but how much, really? Perspective is sorely lacking. Glanz pointed out that server farms consume more power than the paper industry, as though the Internet is simply about displacing paper consumption. That leaves a lot of variables out of the equation.
And closes with a good point.
My guess is that the Internet, on the whole, has been as much an environmental boon as an economic one. I would be interested in an investigative series that tells me otherwise, but that isn’t the series that Glanz and The Times produced.
As with any young and fast-growing industry, efficiency takes a backseat to performance in the initial rush to keep up with demand. Fine-tuning for efficiency will come later. Right now, our greatest achievement is creating a world where users can get the data they want and need, wherever they are, whenever they want it. The Internet’s plumbing is about as newsworthy as that of the average sewage treatment plant, as long as they both do their intended jobs.
James Glanz has fulfilled the role of a data center critic, we'll see how many people are in line to do the same. Roll call. Anyone. Anyone. Anyone want to be a critic of the data center industry?
